The government has quietly extended its own deadline for putting 400 specialist mental health support teams into hundreds of schools across England by the end of April.
The extension comes as schools report being overwhelmed by a pupil mental health crisis compounded by the pandemic and long waiting times for NHS support.
In February, mental health minister Maria Caulfield stated that 399 mental health support teams (MHSTs) would be in place by April.
The 399 teams were expected to cover 3 million young people, roughly 35 per cent of the total, by last month.
But the Department for Education has now told Tes that it cannot confirm whether this target has been met, saying only that it was working to hit the 400 figure “in 2023”, which it said referred to the calendar year.
As Tes revealed in March, an official evaluation of the scheme found that 25 trailblazer sites across England were struggling to retain specialist staff because of the “emotional intensity”, high workload and frustration with the approach and scope of the work.
The rising demand for mental health support in schools and growing gaps in specialist services since the pandemic left the new teams feeling as if they were “in over their head”, according to senior teachers who took part in the evaluation.
The MHSTs were launched to support children in primary, secondary and further education by current education secretary Gillian Keegan, who was a mental health minister at the time, in a joint Department of Health and Department for Education response to the 2017 children and young people’s mental health Green Paper.
Each MHST is expected to serve a population of between 7,000 and 8,000 pupils, or between 10 and 20 education settings.
Previously, health officials have stated that 112 teams began training in 2021-22, with a further 104 to commence training during 2022-23 so that 500 would be in place by April 2023.
MHSTs ‘must be rolled out’ nationally
Sean Duggan, mental health lead for the NHS Confederation, which represents NHS hospitals and mental health services, called for MHSTs to be rolled out nationally.
He said: “When the government was first consulting on the MHSTs, they said that they would evaluate the trailblazer sites and use the learning to roll them out more widely, but there is no dedicated funding to do this. While there are challenges to the model, which need to be addressed, it has to be rolled out so that every child and young person can access these important services.”
And he agreed with the evaluation’s finding that there were problems with teams’ ability to engage with marginalised groups.
For example, he said that cognitive behavioural therapy, which teams have been tasked with delivering, “isn’t always suitable” for certain individuals, and “staff would need the skills to adapt the model for some groups of people”.
Additionally, “some children and young people will not want to access these services in schools”, he added.
But Mr Duggan said that MHSTs were an important service as young people were more likely to speak to someone in their school about their mental health concerns, rather than trying to access overstretched services elsewhere.
Only about 35 to 40 per cent of children and young people with a mental disorder are accessing NHS-funded support, causing a “huge treatment gap”, he added.
A DfE spokesperson said the number of mental health support teams working with schools and colleges was “increasing to 400 in 2023, covering around 35 per cent of pupils in England, with 500 planned to be up and running by 2024”.
